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Thursday, July 14, 2011

Alesis Andromeda A6

Ah, the Alesis Andromeda A6. One of the true modern analog beasts. Boasting 16 voices of analog grit, this synth is raw power. While it's not the prettiest looking board (maybe one of the ugliest even), it's really just telling us not to judge a book by its cover. The Andromeda boasts sine, triangle, square, saw up and saw down waves (one of the very few analogs to have sine waves), as well as 32 total filters. No wonder this thing cost more than 3 grand USD. That may seem like alot of dough for a keyboard, but keep in mind that Moog likes to charge 3.5 grand for a Voyager, and 5 grand for a Voyager XL (that has the same amount of keys as the Andromeda). The engineers behind this beast were brilliant. You can turn off the automatic tuning of the keyboard to give it more vintage warmth, or snap them in to place for a nice tuning. The synth also has some nice digital effects-- don't see those everyday on an analog either. I highly recommend you click this picture to get a better look at all the great features it has. Alesis does wonders in getting so much in for the cost.

Sadly, it's already out of production (I'm assuming the reason is because of the hefty price tag). Hey Alesis, do you want a million dollar idea? Take what you've made here, scale it down to 5 or 6 voices, give it a more vintage style of control, and do whatever else you need to to make it cheap as possible. Hell, you can even break it down further than that for a 1 voice, 3 oscillator analog keyboard as well. I KNOW that Alesis is capable of that-- their engineers are brilliant at packing value into tight spaces. Making something smaller and more entry level would appeal to analog fanatics and newbies alike, and in turn might even give DSI and Moog a run for their money! Let's not forget that Korg is slowly amassing research to enter the analog market again as well... perhaps in another 5 year we'll not only have DSI and Moog, but Korg and Alesis with great analogs of their own! Now, if only someone could whip Roland into making new Jupiters and Junos, we'd all be happy about our keys like we were in the 70s and 80s.

But in the mean time, Alesis, about that smaller analog synth? Pretty please?